Dual Kickstart ROM Replacement for Amiga
25 comments
·April 12, 2025Daviey
mark_round
It's a lot of fun, still! I touched on it in my "Amiga Systems Programming in 2023" post[1] which had some discussion here[2]. In the few years since then there's been lots of development still across the whole scene. OS4 is largely stagnating (although I still fire up my X5000 whenever I have a chance) but the classic 68k scene is positively thriving.
Lots of great software & homebrew games, and the hardware options now are just amazing. There's FPGA, emulation, PiStorm accelerators, Vampire, re-amiga... and only this month, Hyperion released an updated OS3.2[3].
It was (and is) such a versatile, forward-thinking platform and I still very much enjoy seeing how far the community can take it.
[1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2023/08/30/amiga-systems-prog...
tom_
Just about every old platform seems to have a bunch of people building hardware stuff like this and writing new software. For 1980s stuff it's just all a lot simpler than it was back then, and what was cutting edge at the time is hobbyist tier today.
For software, you have modern computer power to bring to bear on the problem. Assembly/compilation/precomputation/prototyping is far quicker, and the debugging possibilities with an emulator are way ahead of anything you'd ever have had at the time. For hardware items there are freely available design tools, many cost-effective options for small production run manufacture, and for stuff like the Amiga (where nothing happens at more than about 16 MHz) logic analyzers are cheap.
And the Internet makes discussing things a lot easier too!
apples_oranges
It’s just fun to program close to the hardware. On modern systems there are 10 layers between your program and the silicon.
icedchai
Same. The Amiga got me started with C programming, eventually leading me to Linux, etc.
amichail
In hindsight, do you think you would have benefited more using Turbo Pascal on a PC?
EvanAnderson
Not the OP, but I started programming on Apple II, then PC, and eventually the Amiga. The Amiga had stuff like multitasking and IPC that "real" operating systems (like Unix) had. Turbo Pascal on DOS was fun, but it was all very simplistic. Windows was a thing but the barrier to entry was too high.
Daviey
Nah, late 90's I switched to PC but didn't feel at "home" until I discovered Linux (slackware, then Debian and friends)
amichail
Did you ever try Turbo Pascal? In the mid 80s, it had no equal.
vardump
Having had both available, Amiga definitely benefited me more.
vardump
40 year old platform. That’s when Amiga 1000 was released.
Daviey
I said 35 years, because the description on github includes these models:
1. Amiga 3000 (1990)
2. Amiga 3000T (1991) - Tower version of the 3000
3. Amiga 4000 (1992)
4. Amiga 1200 (1992) - Released shortly after the 4000
5. Amiga 4000T (1994) - Tower version of the 4000
6. Amiga 4000CR (1996) - Cost Reduced version
7. Amiga 4000TX - No idea and not heard of it beforenull
actionfromafar
So they designed five board layouts of the ROM replacement for various revisions of hardware. That's some real dedication.
codr7
I was very depressed for a long time after giving up my Amiga 500 for a PC.
The Amiga was a fun computer, it had integrity.
bogantech
This is awesome - not only is it a ROM replacement but it can be programmed by the Amiga itself
It also has a feature where you can exchange files with a pc connected via USB
unixhero
I let my Amiga hobby lapse. I realized that what I wanted was friends to come over so we could play together. But we never meet up like that any more. Everyone has kids. And now I have 8 Amigas that are collecting dust.
sonofhans
Oh wow. I remember the first time I played on an Amiga, freshman year college, 1988. Growing up on Commodores and Apple II and DOS, it looked like science fiction. I thought a 3.5” floppy was a hard drive.
We played a lot of a split-screen air combat game that was fun. And a racing game that was unreasonably hard.
robinsonb5
There's a monthly Norwich Amiga Group meeting not too far from where I live - there's usually around 20 people there with various machines, and occasional 2- or 4-player game tournaments!
eschaton
It’s pretty interesting how Amiga and Atari ST followed Macintosh down a bad path of having large amounts of the OS in ROM, which may have made some sense when a single few-hundred-kilobyte floppy was the only storage most users would have, but made a lot less sense just a few years later when the ROM OS needed lots of patches and everyone had some sort of fixed disk to boot from.
null
icedchai
The original Amiga 1000 had a 2 disk boot sequence. First was the Kickstart disk (which later was in ROM), then the next disk was the OS / app ("Workbench") I think the early STs did something similar.
eschaton
Yeah, Amiga 1000 only had a bootstrap ROM, which is what led to having a Kickstart ROM with part of the OS in it—same with the original Atari 260ST/520ST. Apple’s Lisa also had only a bootstrap ROM, which is why it originally had two Twiggy drives and everyone got a hard disk.
Macintosh made the decision to put the OS in ROM to save disk space and make a single-floppy 128KB RAM system livable, but that only lasted a few months since the OS needed fixes and issuing new ROMs is expensive. Nonetheless Amiga and Atari ST did the same thing, and kept pursuing it far beyond when it was a reasonable trade-off just like Apple—who only went back to a bootstrap ROM with the “New World” systems in the very late 1990s.
vaxman
Still have le grand Amiga 1000 garbage in the gar-age...unsuspecting storage boxes filled with systems, boards, volumes of ROM Kernel Manuals, hundreds of period magazines, Aztec C, bazillion dollar 10MB-20MB (yes MB) hard drives and memory cards, case after case of floppy disks, software and hardware schematics for all my projects --many dead scorpions too rofl.
I had gone to a meeting at Disneyland Hotel in 1989-1990 and heard Mehdi Ali (CEO du jour) talk, then went home and forced myself to do a "hard stop" on Amiga after YEARS of around-the-clock (when not "working" to pay for it all haha) single-handedly implementing X.PC (Tymnet VAN's multichannel, dial-up, asynchronous, X.25 protocol) as the base for my grand plan that was going to be a fully distributed network system that used network directories and RPC to implement consumer apps like 10-20 years before Lotus Notes (and Meta Facebook).
Still, when I see projects like this one, I hear the boxes-o-Amigas calling me..someday maybe I will have the courage to put them into a proper trash dumpster (wearing gloves, of course). RIP Jay Miner https://youtu.be/guJOyJyTn5w
EvanAnderson
I know you're being poetic, but please don't dumpsterize that stuff. There are many people who would travel quite far to save it. Nobody is making any more of that old stuff, and it sounds like you might have some items of historical value.
As someone that thanks Amiga for introducing me to my passion for technology (specifically the 500), I am really impressed that active development is happening on a 35 year old platform.. But somewhat surprised.